Opening your page…
You can still use the navigation while it loads.
Opening your page…
You can still use the navigation while it loads.
Disability Inclusion · Foundations
Learn six ways of seeing disability, notice which one your team reaches for first, and use a barrier-removal view on a real decision.
45–55 minutes · 4 lessons · Voluntary learning
See how the oldest lens and its main challenger answer different questions, and why the sentence you write about a problem decides who has to change.
Use functional information the way assessments intend it, without turning it into a verdict about capability, and see what a public agency owes people before compliance becomes a reflex.
Understand disability as identity, language and community, and learn to ask who within a group of disabled people is affected most by a decision.
Run one ordinary problem through all six perspectives, see why a workaround is not a fix, and practice writing a barrier-removal decision with an owner.
Take one recent decision in your unit that affected a disabled colleague or participant. Write the response each perspective would have produced, mark the one that was actually used, and bring the barrier-removal version to your supervisor or team.
Every decision about a disabled person is made through a lens, whether or not anyone names it. This course names six of them. You will see what each perspective is good at, what it misses when it is used alone, and how a deficit-only view quietly turns a design problem into a person problem. By the end you will be able to take an everyday situation, such as a colleague who cannot complete required training, and write the response each perspective would produce, then choose the one that removes the barrier.
Name the lens. Make the barrier the subject. Provide access now, fix the source, name the owner.
Catch a deficit-only framing before it becomes a decision, and turn it into a barrier-removal decision with an owner.
Rewrite one real problem statement from your unit with the barrier as the subject and send it to the owner of the design.
Participation and course completion in this program do not count toward DHS-required training credits unless management, a director, or DHS leadership expressly approves an exception.
Describes disability inclusion as participation supported by policies and practices, and summarizes disability as a common part of the population.
Plain-language information, guidance and training on the Americans with Disabilities Act, including employment and state and local government obligations.
Official ADA information for the public and for state and local governments, including effective communication and program access.
Overview of employment protections, essential functions and reasonable accommodation under the ADA.
Minnesota’s commitment to serving people with disabilities in the most integrated setting appropriate.
State council resources on disability rights, access and policy in Minnesota.